Pro Bono Publico: New Orleans Politics and Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era, 1912-1926. (Volumes I and II).

Social prejudice and moral consideration did not form the basis of city politics and municipal reform in New Orleans during the Progressive Era. The Regular Democratic Organization, the so-called political machine and the civic reformers of New Orleans were more concerned with issues of expanding and centralized municipal authority, regulation of private and public corporations, completion and expansion of public services, living wages and decent working conditions for organized labor, equitable taxation and assessment rates for property holders, and city planning and development. Admittedly, the principal leadership of the municipal reform movement came from the upper crust of New Orleans society and its beliefs had a profound influence on the content of the municipal reform movement. It would be incorrect to assume that social prejudice, class distinctions, and moral considerations formed the basis of city politics. Though the Regular Democrats had supporters among the lower working classes of New Orleans, RDO contained men of all social classes, economic classifications, educational achievements, and political persuasion. The Regular Democratic Organization, too, was dedicated to municipal reform. As a rule, the RDO did not fear or object centralized municipal authority and, broadly speaking, its efforts championed home rule and preserved democratic institutions. At times, however, the commitment of the RDO to democratic institutions stymied efforts to establish an efficient, centralized municipal government. The civic reformers, on the other hand, advocated centralized municipal government only if they could control it. By and large, the social and commercial elite opposed public regulation of business and commerce, accusing the Regulars of politicizing private and public affairs. Unwilling to accept their declining political influence, the civic reformers demanded the restructuring of the municipal government and the realignment of political power in New Orleans. They demonstrated for the commission council form of government and other political reforms. They achieved only modest success, but managed to influence the structure and content of municipal affairs. And, contrary to conventional understanding, the civic reformers did nor desert politics with every electoral defeat. Rather, they organized and politicked through the numerous civic and commercial organizations they controlled, compelling the RDO to temporize its attempts to centralize authority and realign political power in New Orleans

Bearing the Double Burden: Combat Chaplains and the Vietnam War

Throughout the period of the Vietnam War, soldiers and Marines of the United States Military were accompanied into the combat zones by members of the clergy who were also part of the military. These chaplains attempted to bring God to the men in the field by providing spiritual and moral support through worship services and certain counseling duties. A number of chaplains, however, believed so strongly in their ministry that they refused to simply stay “on base” and instead shouldered their packs and journeyed with their troops into the most perilous combat zones. In so doing , these combat chaplains took upon themselves a “double burden” in that they not only bore upon themselves the spiritual and moral well-being of their troops but also suffered the same hardships, privations, and consequences of seeing and experiencing the worst that combat had to offer. As a result, combat chaplains underwent a transformation in the field that changed them from mere sacramental ministers in military uniform to “wounded healers” who advocated for their troops—both during and after the war. In experiencing the horrors of combat, suffering the loss of friends, struggling with the sagging morale of their men as well as their own, and dealing with the moral conflicts posed by the fog of war, combat chaplains became committed to the idea of peace and justice after the war, took a leading role in recognizing and treating post-traumatic stress in themselves, and—as a result—were able to reach out to their fellow veterans and offer them the opportunity to affect their own healing

Alien Registration- Fitzmorris, Lawrence B. (Rumford, Oxford County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/12643/thumbnail.jp

Learning Assisted Decoupled Software Pipelining (LA-DSWP)

In this thesis, I introduce and implement an extension to the Decoupled Software Pipelining (DSWP) algorithm proposed by Rangan et al. This new extension is named Learning Assisted Decoupled Software Pipelining (or LA-DSWP) as it applies reinforcement learning to the partitioning problem found within DSWP. Through experimentation, the viability of DSWP and LA-DSWP as optimizations that produce significant program speedup is tested and measured. As computer architects strive to keep up with public expectations for processor performance growth, they are increasingly turning to processor designs which utilize multiple independent cores on a single chip. Unlike most prior hardware innovations, computer programs must be written or compiled with multiple threads in mind to take advantage of these new hardware innovations. Automatic thread-extraction using Decoupled Software Pipelining seeks to extract multiple threads from a single-threaded program~\cite{ottoni-micro-2005}. This is done by allowing loops within the program to execute on multiple cores on a single processor chip simultaneously without programmer intervention. DSWP focuses on splitting large recursive data structure's traversal loops into multiple threads in an attempt to increase overall program performance. Unlike prior implementations of DSWP, this research uses a hardware and language independent implementation of DSWP using the LLVM framework. Rather than relying on custom-built hardware to facilitate communication between program threads, this implementation uses Intel's Thread Building Blocks library to create queues in the shared memory between the various on-chip processor cores. As this thesis will show, this design setup relies heavily on the memory subsystem of the targeted processors and is greatly impacted by the actual design of the memory subsystem. Another novel addition to DSWP explored in this thesis is the application of machine learning to the partitioning process. Instead of partitioning the nodes of a loop's program dependency graph using predefined heuristics, this thesis seeks to apply reinforcement learning to allow the DSWP agent to make more informed decisions when optimizing a given loop. The DSWP agent is able to collect and analyze data about each node of a program's loop to partition the loop on a node-by-node basis. This addition constitutes LA-DSWP. Through experimentation on modern Intel processors, this thesis tests the feasibility of LA-DSWP on current hardware. Multiple kernel programs were written to search for program patterns that can achieve performance increases using DSWP partitioning. Experiments were run using the partitioning methods discussed in earlier papers along with the proposed method utilizing machine learning

The Career Goals and Pathways of Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Engineering Faculty

This study explores the beliefs and experiences of full-time non-tenure-track faculty members who teach in the engineering programs of public four-year research universities in the United States. Thirteen full-time non-tenure-track engineering faculty were interviewed resulting in sixteen hours of interview data. Data collected via semi-structured interviews reveal each participant’s pathway into engineering, their career goals, career advancement opportunities available to them, and factors that motivated them to pursue a career as a full-time non-tenure-track engineering faculty member. The interview data are coded and analyzed using qualitative analysis software (NVivo) and a constant comparative coding method. Themes emerge from the data which address the research questions along with themes that were not expected. The results of this study show that non-tenure-track faculty have a remarkable variation in both academic experience and professional experience. They are motivated to pursue non-tenure-track positions by a desire to interact with students and to teach in a classroom environment. Non-tenure-track faculty do not desire tenure-track positions although they do desire aspects of tenure, specifically meaningful career advancement, higher salaries, increased career stability, and the respect of their peers. Full-time non-tenure-track engineering faculty are satisfied with their careers although a lack of respect from their tenure-track colleagues and administration, exclusion from participation in departmental governance, and a culture that diminishes the value of their work as teachers cause significant dissatisfaction. Understanding the experiences of non-tenure-track faculty can help programs improve the satisfaction and performance of their non-tenure-track faculty members by implementing policies that value the prior career experience of non-tenure-track faculty, provide a career path that is aligned with their goals, and signal to the non-tenure-track faculty member that they and their contributions are valued by the department and institution